Sunday Herald news editor Angela Haggerty resigns over online ‘threats and abuse’ but will continue to write columns for paper

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Sunday Herald news editor Angela Haggerty, who was previously sacked by the paper in a row over Rangers Football Club, has resigned over “threats and abuse” directed at her online.

Haggerty left the weekly Newsquest-owned newspaper on Friday last week after three months in the role and is planning a change of career, she told Press Gazette.

She said she had dealt with online abuse over six years, but added: “It really took a toll on my health last year. I need to take a step back from the intensity of that, at least for a while.”

Haggerty is set to continue writing her weekly columns for the Sunday Herald and Herald newspapers despite quitting the newsroom.

She said: “I think that’ll be a better balance for me and my new job will take me out of the madness of the spotlight and give me a chance to recuperate after a very difficult number of years.”

Haggerty, who joined the Sunday Herald in 2013, said she had been the subject of abuse and online trolling since editing Phil Mac Giolla Bhain’s book Downfall: How Rangers FC Self-destructed, published in 2012.

Talking to Press Gazette at the time Haggerty said she was “very troubled” by the decision to axe her column, which she felt had “chilling implications for freedom of the press”.

She was reinstated as a columnist on the paper a few weeks later after a “re-examination of the context of her original social media postings” by then editor-in-chief Magnus Llewellin, now editor of the Times in Scotland.

Haggerty was also launch editor of the Scottish news website Common Space which she edited between 2015 and February 2018.

11 thoughts on “Sunday Herald news editor Angela Haggerty resigns over online ‘threats and abuse’ but will continue to write columns for paper”

Three months and then they got rid of her. The “columns” only lasted another month. It would be a sad end if we were talking about a responsible journalist rather than a morally unscrupulous bully, always quick to renose her destructive behaviour as victimisation.

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